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Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

arstechnica.com

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Re: Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

#11

Post by flunhat »

commandlinefan wrote: post #5

> Its public API used no authentication. When users deleted their posts, the site failed to remove the content and instead only added a delete flag to it. Oh, and each post carried a numerical ID that was incremented from the ID of the most recently published one. There's really nothing wrong with any of that, unless you're specifically coding to defend against content scraping. I mean, the whole point of a "tweet" o…

> Worse, but again, was the site even supposed to be designed with anonymity in mind?

Given that a common conspiracy theory espoused on Parler is (was) that vaccines contained tracking microchips (?), I imagine Parler users expected at least some anonymity.

Re: Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

#12

Post by partiallypro »

I still doubt many rioters used Parler to coordinate. Glenn Greenwald has been investigating this and had as of a few days ago found none of those arrested on the platform. Facebook sat on the "stop the steal" FB groups for ~70 days and had so far not gotten much scrutiny.

Re: Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

#13

Post by pavel_lishin »

commandlinefan wrote: post #5

> Its public API used no authentication. When users deleted their posts, the site failed to remove the content and instead only added a delete flag to it. Oh, and each post carried a numerical ID that was incremented from the ID of the most recently published one. There's really nothing wrong with any of that, unless you're specifically coding to defend against content scraping. I mean, the whole point of a "tweet" o…

> There's really nothing wrong with any of that, unless you're specifically coding to defend against content scraping.

> Worse, but again, was the site even supposed to be designed with anonymity in mind?

Yes! Privacy, security and harm/abuse mitigation must be one of the considerations when you're writing a project. This isn't even anonymity, these are basic safeguards one should put in place. Not doing so is like selling a car with no seatbelts, and arguing that there's nothing wrong with that unless you're specifically manufacturing to defend against car crashes.

This isn't like the argument about how many tests you should have and what kind; this absolutely must be one of the key things to consider when you're creating a project that's going to be used by people to communicate with one another.

Re: Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

#14

Post by LarryDarrell »

From what I understand, Parler was bankrolled and designed to do exactly what it was ultimately shutdown for. That is, be a concentrated anger-machine-echo-chamber. I'm not angry at the public corporations that have dropped Parler. I'm angry at the people that created Parler in the first place. It was basically a poison pill designed to test our feelings about free speech, designed to provoke. Mission accomplished, buttheads.

I think we'll see the angry mob go end up at less discoverable, but more robust distributed platforms. Which is a shame, because it means eventually, when I say that you can find me on Mastadon/Scuttlebutt/etc, the average person will say, "Oh, you're on that extremist network?"

The benefit to Facebook/Reddit/Twitter is that while Parler is dominating the discussion, they can start cleaning up their most toxic communities.

Re: Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

#15

Post by gregmac »

eutropia wrote: post #3

I’m morbidly curious: what was their tech stack?

Sarah Mei did an interesting thread [1] on one aspect. A few months back, they had an unexpected outage that turned out to be caused by hitting 2,147,483,648 notifications. That number should look instantly familiar to most programmers.

[1] https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1348474269064339456

Re: Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

#16

Post by freewilly1040 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #5

> Its public API used no authentication. When users deleted their posts, the site failed to remove the content and instead only added a delete flag to it. Oh, and each post carried a numerical ID that was incremented from the ID of the most recently published one. There's really nothing wrong with any of that, unless you're specifically coding to defend against content scraping. I mean, the whole point of a "tweet" o…

Why is the auto incrementing ID bad? Easier to scrape, I suppose, if the db ID was in the URL

Re: Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

#17

Post by [deleted] »

LarryDarrell wrote: post #14

From what I understand, Parler was bankrolled and designed to do exactly what it was ultimately shutdown for. That is, be a concentrated anger-machine-echo-chamber. I'm not angry at the public corporations that have dropped Parler. I'm angry at the people that created Parler in the first place. It was basically a poison pill designed to test our feelings about free speech, designed to provoke. Mission accomplished, b…

[deleted]

Re: Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

#18

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #17
LarryDarrell wrote: post #14

From what I understand, Parler was bankrolled and designed to do exactly what it was ultimately shutdown for. That is, be a concentrated anger-machine-echo-chamber. I'm not angry at the public corporations that have dropped Parler. I'm angry at the people that created Parler in the first place. It was basically a poison pill designed to test our feelings about free speech, designed to provoke. Mission accomplished, b…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

#19

Post by jasonladuke0311 »

whatshisface wrote: post #10
commandlinefan wrote: post #5

> Its public API used no authentication. When users deleted their posts, the site failed to remove the content and instead only added a delete flag to it. Oh, and each post carried a numerical ID that was incremented from the ID of the most recently published one. There's really nothing wrong with any of that, unless you're specifically coding to defend against content scraping. I mean, the whole point of a "tweet" o…

> Worse, but again, was the site even supposed to be designed with anonymity in mind? According to reports from several HN users who tried making accounts, Parler requires drivers license photos as a part of the process you have to go through before you can post. Rather than being designed for anonymity, they seem designed to identify all of their users as unequivocally as possible.

So it was a honeypot.

Re: Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

#20

Post by [deleted] »

jasonladuke0311 wrote: post #19
whatshisface wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worse, but again, was the site even supposed to be designed with anonymity in mind? According to reports from several HN users who tried making accounts, Parler requires drivers license photos as a part of the process you have to go through before you can post. Rather than being designed for anonymity, they seem designed to identify all of their users as unequivocally as possible.

So it was a honeypot.

[deleted]
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